1 – GpuTest 0.4.0 Overview

GpuTest is a 64-bit cross-platform OpenGL benchmarking utility for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. GpuTest comes with several OpenGL tests including FurMark (OpenGL 3.2), TessMark (OpenGL 4.0) as well as new ones like GiMark (geometry instancing) or PixMark (heavy pixel shaders).

The version 0.4.0 of GpuTest is available and this time, OS X users can taste OpenGL 4 tessellation on their Mac systems. I must say that I was rather suprised when I saw TessMark running smoothly on my Macbook Pro Retina (Intel HD Graphics 4000 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M) with OSX 10.8.3, after having removed all checks I usually do in the initialization of an OpenGL demo. Apple has added in OS X more OpenGL 4 support than I thought, which is pretty cool. TessMark works fine with the GeForce GT 650M while the rendering is a bit perturbed with the HD Graphics 4000 as you can see on the following pictures:

OS X 10.7 and 10.8 officially support OpenGL 3.2 only (more details HERE). But Apple has added some features of OpenGL 3.3 and OpenGL 4.0 in OS X. That’s why we can run GiMark (OpenGL 3.3 test) and now TessMark (OpenGL 4.0) under OS X. Keep in mind that OpenGL 4 is not official and is partially supported on Mac OS X, that’s why TessMark might not run on some Mac systems.

GpuTest 0.4.0 also fixes a small bug with Radeon cards under Linux in TessMark test:

TessMark bug with Radeon based cards under Linux

The rendering of the Piano demo has been improved with a better noise texture to get the old and rusty look wanted by iq in his original webgl demo:

I understand, I’m just curious which specific extensions Apple exposed under OSX 10.8.3 that enabled tessellation shaders. I, like you, was under the impression only OpenGL ~3.3 was supported. I only have the Intel HD 4000 so I’m unable to see for myself. Thanks.

@soconne: Apple (or maybe NVIDIA/Intel, I don’t know exactly who) added the support of tessellation shaders without exposing the GL_ARB_tessellation_shader extension. If you have an Intel HD 4000, you can test the tessellation demo, the HD 4000 is an OpenGL 4 capable GPU. But as I said in the overview of GpuTest 0.4.0, the rendering of the TessMark demo is not correct on HD 4000.

This doesn’t seem to work on an Ivy Bridge HD4000 system (Win7) even though I’m using the latest Intel drivers. Evey test I’ve tried (starting from the GUI) fails. Don’t know if it’s something specific to me or a known failure/limitation.

Tried Tessmark on an iMac with a 6970m. It worked, and rendered correctly. Although very slowly (1fps with high cpu usage), so it seems like it’s dropping back to software rendering on that card at least.

10.8.4 with updated AMD drivers, no change 🙁
Piano still crashes on 7xxx cards, Volplosion runs but score is still 19 fps. My 7950 w.Boost runs currently @1175/1375 instead of stock 925/1250 and it does not have an impact on Volplosion score.

On 10.9 DP2, with the new 13″ MacBook Air 2013, boosted version (HD 5000/core i7 1.7 GHz), I get 22 FPS at the TessMark x32 with fourfold antialiasing, fullscreen (1440×900). Running x64 halves that performance. Without antialiasing, the performance ramps up to 70 FPS. Without antialiasing, the x64 test runs at 32 FPS, which is reasonable.